St. Catherine Labouré

Who they were

Catherine was a Burgundian farmer's daughter. Her mother died when she was nine, and the child famously took the family's statue of Mary and said that now you will be my mother. She ran the household from eleven and entered the Daughters of Charity at twenty four.

Within months, at the rue du Bac in Paris in 1830, she reported the apparitions that produced the Miraculous Medal: Our Lady standing on the globe, rays from her hands, and the words O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee, with the instruction to strike a medal after this pattern. The medal was struck in 1832 and spread across the world in millions. Then comes the part that makes her this wave's quiet giant. Catherine told no one but her confessor, and for forty six years, while the medal circled the globe, she worked in complete anonymity tending elderly and difficult men at a hospice in the Paris suburbs: cooking, cleaning, keeping the door, keeping the hens. Her identity was revealed only months before her death in 1876. Her body rests, remarkably preserved, in the rue du Bac chapel.

Why people turn to St. Catherine Labouré

Everyone whose faithfulness has no audience, and the caregivers of the elderly, whose work she did for half a century after seeing what she saw.

How to ask their intercession

If you wear the medal, this is where it came from. Ask her prayers for the grace she mastered, which was doing the next ordinary task after the extraordinary thing.